Shofar FTP Archive File: orgs/american/ihr/press/newsday.022494

Archive/File: pub/orgs/ihr/press newsday.022494
Archive/File: pub/orgs/codoh/press newsday.022494
Last-Modified: 1994/07/26
Copyright 1994 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday
February 24, 1994, Thursday, NASSAU AND SUFFOLK EDITION
SECTION: PART II; Pg. 68
LENGTH: 3404 words
HEADLINE: Assault on History; Is America fertile ground for those who
claim the Holocaust didn't happen? Jewish leaders are hard-pressed to
deal with such an absurd proposition.
BYLINE: By Bob Keeler. Staff Writer
BODY:
FOR THE SMALL but increasingly visible group of people who deny
history by spreading the perverse claim that the Holocaust is little
more than a long-running Jewish hoax, these are interesting times.
Though the Steven Spielberg film "Schindler's List" has
dramatically heightened awareness of the Holocaust and reinforced the
cold historical truth of Nazi genocide, it has not slowed the
movement of Holocaust-denial, spread in the plast three years mainly
through advertisements in college newspapers by a small band of
California-based propagandists. The ad campaign has led to media
coverage of denial doctrine and significantly elevated the profile of
the self-proclaimed Holocaust "revisionists."
One of their ads appeared in this week's issue of the independent
student newspaper at Queens College, the latest instance of the
deniers causing a campus commotion with an ad challenging the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum to prove that the Nazis gassed Jews
to death during World War II.
There is, of course, no real debate about the Nazis' "Final
Solution." The documented truth is that Hitler's Germany mounted a
systematic program for the destruction of European Jewry and killed
as many as 6 million Jews and millions of others. In 1991, confronted
by deniers at its meeting in Chicago, the American Historical
Association voted unanimously to condemn Holocaust denial, saying:
"No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place." When
a group of deniers showed up at a meeting last month in San
Francisco, the association's governing council reaffirmed that
statement.
Still, American scholars and Jewish leaders say they worry that
the deniers, who almost universally lack any scholarly credentials,
have made progress in spreading their grotesque gospel - essentially,
that Jews used the Holocaust "hoax" to steal reparations from Germany
and to justify the creation of Israel on Arab lands. Over the years,
deniers have also claimed that concentration-camp crematoria were
used to dispose of those who died of natural causes and did not have
a large enough capacity to produce 6 million deaths; that only a few
hundred thousand Jews died, most of them from disease; even that "The
Diary of Anne Frank" was a fraud.
Such outlandish claims go back 25 years in this country, and to
immediately after World War II in Argentina and parts of Europe. But
now, American Jewish leaders say they are concerned that the deniers
might be finding a receptive audience in this country, with polls
showing significant numbers of Americans ignorant about the
Holocaust. In one finding, by the Roper Organization for the American
Jewish Committee in 1992, 22 percent of adults and 20 percent of high
school students answered that "it seems possible that the Nazi
extermination of the Jews never happened." Another 12 percent of
adults and 17 percent of students said they didn't know.
"One of the things they have achieved is that they have put their
propositions on the public agenda," said Jeffrey Ross of the
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. To Ross and others, the
deniers play on ignorance and bigotry to advance their real agenda.
"The bottom line is anti-Semitism," said Marvin Stern, Pacific
Northwest regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. "You can't
intellectually combat Holocaust denial." As a result, Holocaust
scholars and Jewish leaders say, their problem is one of strategy:
how to combat the deniers without dignifying them - and being drawn
into a debate about the undebatable. "It's the historical equivalent
of two plus two equals five," said Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of
Jewish studies at Emory University in Atlanta and author of the
recent book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory."
A rise in Holocaust awareness over the past year may help, Jewish
leaders say. Since its opening nine months ago in Washington, the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has drawn 1.4 million
visitors and generated a flood of publicity. And "Schindler's List,"
which has earned 12 Academy Award nominations, is already the most
commercially successful film treatment of the Holocaust. It has been
playing to sold-out theaters since its release in December. The
museum clearly vexes the deniers, who are attacking it in their ads.
But like other films and books about the Holocaust, "Schindler's
List" leaves the deniers unmoved.
"They may see Spielberg's movie as something that they don't like,
because it hits home in graphic terms," said Kenneth Stern, author of
a 1993 American Jewish Committee book on Holocaust denial. "On the
other hand, they will probably dismiss it as just another
'exterminationist' point of view."
That's exactly what the deniers say. "It's just part of the
ongoing and seemingly never-ending Holocaust campaign, which is
supported not only by Hollywood, but by our government," said Mark
Weber, editor of the Journal of Historical Review, which attempts to
give deniers credibility by looking like a respected scholarly
journal.
"The problem here is that there is so little evidence," said Ted
O'Keefe, who is reviewing "Schindler's List" for the May/June issue
of the publication, which is put out by the academic-sounding
Institute for Historical Review but deals almost exclusively with
Holocaust denial. The 15-year-old organization, based in Newport
Beach, Calif., claims a mailing list of 30,000 and a budget of $
500,000, mostly from sales of books and tapes challenging the
Holocaust.
O'Keefe's claims are typical of the deniers' dogma. "Except for
the cartoonish figures of the Nazis and the explicit brutality, the
film in terms of establishing the Holocaust is essentially an
argument by innuendo," said O'Keefe, one of seven full-time staff
members of the Institute for Historical Review. In fact, the deniers
say there is nothing unusual about the film's portrayal of Jews
surviving. They have argued that there were more Jews after the war
than before. In any event, said O'Keefe, "We tend to welcome these
cultural explosions, because they tend to keep the spotlight on us."
Though historians reject all the deniers' claims as anti-Semitic
nonsense, some Jewish leaders feel the need to keep the evidence
coming. With the fall of the Soviet Union, they expect millions of
pages of Nazi documents to become available, allowing scholars in the
next few years to fill in the remaining gaps in information about
what happened to Jews in the areas of Europe controlled by the
Soviets after World War II.
"We believe that good scholarship ultimately drives fraud from the
marketplace," said Michael Berenbaum, director of the United States
Holocaust Research Institute in Washington, whose book, "Anatomy of
the Death Camp Auschwitz," will be published this spring by Indiana
University Press.
The deniers dismiss not only the work of serious researchers, but
the testimony of Holocaust survivors. For these survivors, the
denial of their fearsome suffering is a source of great pain.
One such survivor is Edith Vardy of Great Neck. When a friend told
her about a radio discussion of Holocaust deniers, Vardy was
unprepared. "I was shocked," she said. "It was so hurting me, the
whole thing."
Vardy's mother and two small brothers went through the Auschwitz
gas chambers on May 20, 1944, the day the family arrived from a
ghetto in Hungary. For the next eight months, the young Edith Heimann
and her sister, Elish-ewa, lived in a barracks separated by an
electrified fence from a gas chamber and crematorium. Their job was
to tear apart the personal effects of those killed in the gas chamber
and look for valuables. They divided the possessions into piles, and
she remembers one was a heartbreaking hill of infant pacifiers.
In those eight months Vardy saw how the Nazis lulled the gas
chamber victims by telling them to hang their clothes up carefully
and remember where they had put them, as if they were coming back.
She heard prisoners screaming inside the chambers. She learned how
the Nazis forced Jewish prisoners to run the gas chamber and
crematoria, then killed them and used new prisoners.
The evening before one of those groups was to die, she remembers,
a Hungarian doctor told her that he and other prisoners had agreed to
sign a document attesting they had "operated the crematoria only for
people who died naturally."
A reporter related Vardy's experience to Bradley Smith, the man
behind the college newspaper ads. He calls his group the Committee
for Open Debate on the Holocaust. Smith was unmoved. "There were no
gas chambers there," Smith said. "This stuff is just junk."
The insouciant rejection of evidence and the whole denial
enterprise, Jewish leaders argue, has a simple goal: to make the
racist, ethnocentric agenda of neofascism more acceptable by casting
doubt on the unspeakable crimes of the Nazis, which gave fascism an
intolerable odor.
The roots of denial lie in the rise of neofascist groups in Europe
in the 1960s and 1970s, says Emory's Deborah Lipstadt. The deniers
got a shot in the arm in 1976 with the publication of a book called
"The Hoax of the Twentieth Century," by a Northwestern University
electrical engineering professor named Arthur Butz. His book was a
breakthrough: Published by a small outfit known for racist and
anti-Semitic literature, it was nonetheless the first appearance of
Holocaust-denial claims outside the neo-Nazi fringe, in a work
festooned with all the trappings of scholarship, such as bibliography
and footnotes.
The Butz book remains a top seller for the Institute for
Historical Review, which was founded in 1978 and is now at the heart
of the deniers' world. One of its founders was Willis Carto, also
the founder of the Liberty Lobby, which the conservative columnist
William Buckley called "a hotbed of anti-Semitism." Carto is
described by Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee as "one
of the most energetic, long-standing professional anti-Semites in the
United States today." (Carto did not return a call to the Liberty
Lobby in Washington).
The number of true disbelievers today, and whether it is growing,
is unclear. "The numbers are probably small, but when you have a
hating group like that, you don't need large numbers," Lipstadt said.
The paid circulation of the Journal of Historical Review has tripled
in the last year, to 6,000, claims Mark Weber, the editor. He said
the institute's conferences, which are held every year or two,
attract 150 to 200 people.
In combating what they see as the deniers' growing visibility,
historians say they are hard-pressed to deal with them responsibly.
"This has been a difficult project, because at times I have felt
compelled to prove something I knew to be true," Lipstadt wrote in
her book. "I had constantly to avoid being inadvertently sucked into
a debate that is no debate and an argument that is no argument."
In fact, a California court has taken "judicial notice" of the
Holocaust - a legal term that means stipulating an obvious fact about
which there is no debate. The case arose from a 1979 challenge by the
Institute for Historical Review, offering $ 50,000 to anyone who
"could prove that the Nazis operated gas chambers to execute Jews
during World War II." The offer was designed to get publicity for the
institute, then only a year old. The publicity came, but at a high
cost.
In its bulletin, the institute carried an open letter to one
Auschwitz survivor, Mel Mermelstein, a California shipping-pallet
manufacturer who had criticized the institute in letters to
newspapers. The institute accused Mermelstein of "peddling the
extermination hoax" and challenged him to provide proof. Mermelstein,
the only survivor from a family of six, responded with a notarized
description of his own experience, among other information. When the
institute rejected his submission, Mermelstein sued.
In 1981, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Thomas Johnson
ruled that the Holocaust was "not reasonably subject to dispute,"
adding: "The court does take judicial notice that Jews were gassed to
death in Poland in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944," when Mermelstein
and his family were there.
"In 1985, I won a stipulated judgment for $ 150,000, which I
decided to reduce to $ 90,000, provided they pay a certain way: I
wanted to get paid forthwith," Mermelstein said. The institute sent
him checks for $ 50,000 and $20,000 on time, but the final $ 20,000
check was delayed in the mail. Mermelstein took them back to court
over that, determined not to give the deniers even an inch of slack.
"I got the full $ 90,000, plus $ 38.36 for late payment," he said. In
1990, his story became a television movie starring Leonard Nimoy.
The Mermelstein case hardly fazed the deniers. "These guys are
working for the long run," said Ross, of the Anti-Defamation League.
"They know full well that ten or fifteen years down the road, there
is going to be no one left who's a survivor." In her book, Lipstadt
said that they aim to "plant seeds of doubt that will bear fruit in
coming years . . ."
At least in America, there may be some fertile soil for those
seeds of doubt. In the 1992 Roper survey, 38 percent of adults and 53
percent of high school students could not say what the term
"Holocaust" refers to. The study also found that the significant
percentage of Americans that believes it's possible Nazi genocide
didn't happen cuts through lines of age, education and background. In
Britain and France, polls turned up much lower receptivity to
Holocaust denial. A poll is now under way in Germany.
Berenbaum, the Holocaust researcher, says some of the willingness
to question history may be attributable to an American kind of
cynicism about anything official. And some people, he said, may be
unwilling to believe something so barbaric could actually happen in
the modern world.
"The real issue here is ignorance," said David Singer, the
American Jewish Committee's polling expert. While there is no
evidence that deniers created these attitudes, Singer said, they
might be able to exploit them. The organization plans to conduct a
new survey next month to assess whether the Holocaust museum and
"Schindler's List" have had any effect.
The deniers have two other things working for them: the aura of
respectability they have cultivated and the American devotion to free
speech. Though Jewish leaders insist that deniers are motivated by
anti-Semitism, deniers don't always look or sound the part. "When you
meet them, they're not frothing at the mouth, and they're not
yelling, 'Heil Hitler,' " Lipstadt said.
Demonstrating a concern for public relations, the Institute for
Historical Review recently bounced Willis Carto, apparently because
he was pushing positions that might damage its scholarly image.
"Carto over the last couple of years became interested in turning the
IHR from its revisionist, scholarly course," O'Keefe said. "It would
have involved lowering our editorial standards, and it would have
involved bringing in stuff on race and other polemical issues that we
wanted to stay clear of."
In the long term, the biggest public relations problem for the
deniers may turn out to be "Schindler's List," already acclaimed as
the greatest feature film ever made about the Holocaust. But while
Marvin Stern said it may help fill "that vacuum of knowledge in the
popular culture," Lipstadt cautioned: "There is no finality to
anti-Semitism and prejudice."
For the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors, the deniers have
given them an enhanced sense of duty to tell their stories. "I don't
have a right not to," Edith Vardy said.
When she dies, Vardy told her son Michael, she wants the arm with
the Auschwitz tattoo removed and left for a museum. "This should be
for the next generation, for the deniers," she said, holding out her
arm. "I will not talk from my grave, but my hand should be here."
Rewriting History 101: Bradley Smith's Campus Campaign
When the ad from Bradley Smith's Committee for Open Debate on the
Holocaust arrived on the campus of Brandeis University, the editorial
board of the college paper, The Justice, voted overwhelmingly to
publish it. "I believe, as a journalist, as a human and as a Jew,
that this advertisement needs to be published to expose anti-Semitism
for what it is," said Howard Jeruchimowitz, a member of the board who
has since become the paper's editor.
Getting the ad - promoting the idea the Nazis never operated gas
chambers - published on a campus where twothirds of the students are
Jewish was Smith's "greatest achievement," said Jeffrey Ross,
director of campus affairs and higher education for the
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, and one of Smith's most vocal
opponents.
On campus, however, the decision was not so popular. The paper's
editor was threatened, and his car was vandalized. Two-thousand
copies of the newspaper disappeared. And while the Brandeis editors
say they made a reasoned judgment with the best of intentions,
Holocaust scholars say it was a typical response by Smith's young
targets.
Holocaust experts who closely monitor and condemn the acceptance
of the ads say that Smith, a former concrete contractor and now
full-time Holocaust denier, preys on the idealism and naivete of
college students. They say that some don't seem to understand that
the First Amendment does not require a college paper - or any paper -
to print anything. "What he's doing is using the First Amendment not
as a shield but as a sword," Ross said last week at a seminar on
deniers at Queens College. The meeting was prompted by controversy
over the acceptance of Smith's ad by the college paper, the Quad.
About 30 percent of the students at Queens are Jewish.
Smith's California-based advertising campaign is the front line of
the Holocaust-denial war. In the three years that Smith has been
sending his ads to college newspapers (which have inexpensive
advertising and can offer chances for controversy and publicity),
more than 30 papers have accepted them, including daily college
newspapers at major campuses such as Northwestern, Duke, Cornell and
Ohio State universities and the University of Michigan.
Protests have followed some decisions to accept the ad. The
student editors of the Ohio State Lantern, one of the largest college
dailies, triggered a campus uproar when they decided to publish the
ad. "It is repulsive to think that the quality, or total lack
thereof, of any idea or opinion has any bearing on whether it should
be heard,' the editors explained in an editorial. At other campuses,
editors have printed the ad to "expose" Smith and the deniers.
Some student editors have tried to take the sting out of running
the ad by giving the money to charity. Andrew Wallenstein, editor of
The Quad at Queens College, which deleted Smith's address and
solicitation of funds, said he would return Smith's $ 230 check. "So
then he's giving Bradley Smith free space," complained Michael
Berenbaum, director of the United States Holocaust Research
Institute.
The Quad ran the ad on its front page, next to an editorial
describing it as a "sham" that was the moral equivalent of a
swastika. Inside, the paper ran a full-page letter from college
President Shirley Strum Kenny criticizing the acceptance of the ad.
Last fall, Smith managed to get the ad into a general-circulation
newspaper, The Portland Oregonian. The ad "was repugnant and we
regret having published it," the Oregonian said later. "It fell
through the cracks," said the publisher, Fred Stickel.
Smith, 63, who grew up in South Central Los Angeles, became a
Holocaust "revisionist" after reading one of the main denial books,
"The Hoax of the Twentieth Century," by Arthur Butz. In 1987 he
founded the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust with Mark
Weber, the editor of the Journal of Historical Review. The committee
now consists of Smith and five regional directors.
Smith says he concentrates on about 200 colleges. His current ad,
the fourth in the series, challenges the United States Holocaust
Museum to prove that the Nazis gassed even one Jew to death. Smith
continues circulating the ad, but at Brandeis, for one, it is now
history. "I'm more interested in how the Jewish community is going to
deal with Bradley R. Smith, neo-Nazis and anti-Semitism,"
Jeruchimowitz said. "Personally, I'd like to take his stuff and throw
it out."
GRAPHIC: Newsday Color cover Illustration by Gary Viskupic - Figure
of a man as a concentration camp. 1) AP Special / Fred Mason Photo -
Bradley Smith, working on 'revisionist' literature in his Visalia,
Calif. garage, heads a small band of propagandists running newspaper
ads denying the Holocaust. 2) AP File Photo-Sole survivor in a family
of six, Melvin Mermelstein in Los Angeles in the '80s after he won a
court judgment against Holocaust deniers. He holds a photo of himself
and fellow Nazi camp prisoners. 3) AP Special / Wilford Harewood
Photo- Emory Professor Deborah Lipstadt has written a book on the
assault of the Holocaust truth. 4) Newsday Photo by Kathy Kmonicek -
Edith Vardy of Great Neck bears a number tattoo from Auschwitz, where
her mother and brothers were gassed. 5) Photo - Smith's ad ran on
Page One of this week's Queens College Quad, with a critical
editorial beside it. Inside, the college president blasted the ad's
appearance.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE-MDC: February 25, 1994

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